Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  This time Marvin didn’t pass on cross-examination.

  “Did you think the defendant was dead?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was breathing. Dead people don’t breathe.”

  “Thank you for telling us that. Did anybody pay you to come here today?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Did anybody pay your friend Virgil Morales to come here today?”

  She chewed her gum and turned her right hand in the air, looking at the rings on her fingers.

  “Did you understand the question?” Marvin said.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking. How come you question me and not him? Like, I’m dumb and he’s smart, or I’m smart and Virgil’s a beaner can’t understand big words?” she replied.

  “Have you been using any narcotics today, Ms. Lake?”

  “Yeah, I just scored some crystal from the bailiff. Where’d they get you?”

  Then Marvin introduced into evidence the subpoenaed bank records of both Jamie Lake’s and Virgil Morales’s checking accounts.

  “You and Virgil both made deposits of five thousand dollars on the same day three weeks ago, Ms. Lake. How’d y’all come by this good fortune?” Marvin said.

  “I didn’t make a deposit. It just showed up on my statement,” she said.

  “It has nothing to do with your testimony today? Just coincidence?”

  “I was UA-ed and I took a polygraph.”

  “What you took is money.”

  “What’s-his-face over there, Lucas, looked like a corpse that fell out of an icebox. You don’t like what I tell you, go play with your suspenders. Excuse me, I take that back. Go fuck yourself, you little twit.”

  Set up and sandbagged, and I had walked right into it.

  AN HOUR LATER I drove Mary Beth to our small airport. The windows of my car were beaded with water, and lightning forked without sound into the hills.

  “Don’t feel bad,” she said.

  “It was a slick ruse. Those two kids were telling the truth, but somebody gave them money and turned them into witnesses for the prosecution.”

  “Felix Ringo and Jack Vanzandt sent them to you?”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Sorry.”

  There was nothing for it. Everything I said to her was wrong. We stood under a dripping shed and watched a two-engine plane taxi toward us, its propellers blowing water off the airstrip. I felt a sense of ending that I couldn’t give words to.

  “I didn’t do you much good, did I?” she said.

  “Sure you did.”

  “I have to think over some things. I’ll be better about calling this time,” she said.

  Then a strange thing happened, as though I were an adolescent boy caught up in his sexual fantasies. I hugged her lightly around the shoulders, my cheek barely touching hers, but in my mind’s eye I saw her undressed, smelled the heat in her skin, the perfume that rose from her breasts, felt her bare stomach press against my loins. It wasn’t lust. It was an unrequited desire, like a flame sealed inside my skin, one that would not be relieved and that told me I was completely alone. For just a moment I understood why people drank and did violent things.

  “So long,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Mary Beth.”

  “Watch your butt.”

  “You bet.”

  I watched her plane take off in the rain, its wings lifting steadily toward a patch of blue in the west. I got in my car and drove back to town. The hills were sodden and green under clouds that churned like curds from burning oil tanks.

  L.Q. NAVARRO WAS waiting for me when I got home. He leaned his hands on the windowsill in the library and looked out at a cold band of light on the western horizon.

  “It’s been a mighty wet spring,” he said.

  “I might have blown the trial today, L.Q.”

  “You know what you got on your side? It’s that boy’s character. He’s got sand. You know why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He’s your son.”

  “You always looked after me, L.Q.”

  “Know how I’d run it? Put that boy on the stand and let the jury see what he’s made of.”

  I still had my hat on. I sat in the stuffed leather chair in the corner and pulled my hat brim down over my eyes. I could hear L.Q.’s spurs tinkling on the rug.

  “That DEA woman got you down?” he asked.

  “Remember the time we went to that beer garden in Monterrey? The mariachi bands were playing, and you flamenco danced with that lady who played the castanets. It was cool every night and we could see fires out in the hills when the sun went down. Life was real good to us then, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “What’s her name, Mary Beth, I still think she’s a right good gal. Sometimes you got to let a mare have her head.”

  “Hope you won’t take offense, L.Q., but how about shutting up?” I said.

  “Read your great-grandpa’s journal. All good things come to the righteous and the just.”

  I fell asleep amid the sounds of distant thunder. When I woke up a half hour later, L.Q. was gone and Bunny Vogel was banging on my door.

  HE SAT AT my kitchen table with a cup of coffee in his hand, his bronze hair splayed damply on his neck.

  “Start over again,” I said.

  “The old man was in the sack with this woman works at the mill. He said he’d latched the screen. He figures Moon slipped a match cover in it and popped the hook up. It was the gal, Geraldine’s her name, who saw him first. She goes, ‘Herbert, there’s a man in the doorway. He’s watching us,’ and she rolls the old man off her and tries to pull the sheet over herself.

  “Moon was leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, tipping his ashes in his hand. The old man says, ‘You get the fuck out of here.’

  “Moon says, ‘I wouldn’t let that in my bed unless I painted it with turpentine and run castor oil through it first.’

  “The old man says, ‘I got a gun in my drawer.’ Moon laughs and goes, ‘A fat old fart like you would have to Vaseline his finger to get it through the trigger guard.’

  “Then he picks up Geraldine’s dress and tosses it at her and says, ‘Go ’head on, woman. I ain’t interested in what you got.’

  “The old man tried to get up, and Moon pushed him back down with three fingers. A big fat naked guy, wheezing on cigarettes, trying to get off the mattress while another guy kept shoving him down.”

  “What did Moon tell him?”

  “He says, ‘Sorry I missed Bunny. I hear he ripped some Longhorn ass up at A&M. I like that.’”

  “Nothing else?”

  Bunny stared at the door of the icebox, widening his eyes, flexing his jawbone, as though he were watching a moving picture on the unblemished whiteness of the door. Then his throat made a muted sound and he started over and said, “He put my old man’s nose between his fingers and squeezed and twisted it. He kept smiling down at him while he done it.”

  The whites of Bunny’s eyes had turned pink and glistened with an unnatural shine, like the surface of a peeled hard-boiled egg that’s been tainted with dye. He stared down into his coffee cup.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “What is it, Bunny?”

  “The old man had me drop him at the bus depot. He said he was gonna visit my grandma in Corpus. He said I ought to do the same.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” I said.

  Then Bunny began to weep.

  “What are you hiding, kid? What makes you so ashamed?” I asked.

  But he didn’t reply.

  I COULDN’T SLEEP. I went to the café by the church to eat a late dinner, but it was closed. So I
drove to the drive-in restaurant north of town, that neon-lighted square of neutral territory that was dominated by East Enders during the week because of the amount of money they had to spend and their freedom from jobs and responsibility. Or maybe it was the only place where they could take their secret need and see it in the faces of others and for a short time not be bothered by its presence in themselves.

  I sat in a red vinyl booth by the window and looked through the rain at the line of parked cars under the canvas awning that had been pulled out on guy wires. The windows of the cars were steamed from the inside, some of the engines running, the tailpipes wisping tongues of smoke in the rain. Occasionally, a cigarette would drop sparking from a wind vane, or a shoulder, a clutch of hair, would press against the glass. But no one, at least not I, knew what went on inside each of those hand-buffed, lacquered, chopped and channeled cars whose surfaces seemed to ignite like colored flame when touched by neon.

  It was a weeknight, so the kids inside those cars were not the kind to worry about school. Did they neck with the innocent, dry lust of a previous generation? Or drink beer with a sense of discovery and wonder, as though the spring season and their own physical yearning and the brassy cold glow in the backs of their throats held a portent for them that was like an endless song? Was the greenness of their lives like a bursting flower scattering pollen from their open palms?

  Or were they already bitten with ennui and hatred of one another, joyless in their couplings, insatiable in their disdain for difference without knowing why? Darl Vanzandt’s ’32 Ford was backed into the middle of the row under the canvas awning. Its cherry-red finish gleamed with the wet, hard luster of a tunnel wound. The passenger’s window was rolled down, and Darl’s bare arm was curled on the sill, the bicep pumped like a small, white grapefruit. A girl sat on his lap, combing his hair, shaping and reshaping it as though she were creating a sculpture. He turned his face toward the restaurant window and his expression was as morally empty, his eyes as sightless, as a perforated sack of skin stuffed with chemical jelly.

  The waitress brought me a steak, with two fried eggs on top of it, and an order of refried beans and tortillas. I broke the egg yolks on the steak, sliced the meat in strips and rolled the strips with beans inside a tortilla. When I looked up, the girl from Darl’s car was running through the rain for the restaurant. She came through the door, shaking water out of her hair, and dropped a quarter into the pay phone by my booth, glancing back through the window, her slippered foot tapping on the floor.

  “Mr. Vanzandt? . . . Yeah, it’s Holly. Look, Darl’s not exactly in good driving shape,” she said. “Yeah, well, I’d drive him home and all that, but he just told me to take my diaphragm and get the fuck out of his life, so I think I’m just gonna say nighty-nighty and let somebody else clean up his shit. Bye, now.”

  After she hung up she looked at the phone and said, “Fuckhead,” and went out the door.

  While I was paying my check at the cash register, I saw Jack Vanzandt’s Cadillac drive into the parking area with a black man behind the wheel and Jack get out in a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a polo shirt and walk to his son’s car. Darl still sat in the passenger’s seat, but now with his head on his chest. Jack tipped Darl’s head back and tried to wake him, but Darl’s face was bloodless, his eyes closed, his skin glowing with the tallowy shine of melted wax.

  By the time I started my Avalon, Jack had gotten behind the wheel of Darl’s car and had driven the two of them to the highway’s entrance. Jack was waiting for a line of traffic to pass so he could turn left, while I was about to turn right and go back to the West End. Then I had one of those moments that nullify all easy definitions about human behavior and the nature of love.

  A pair of truck high beams flooded the interior of the chopped-down Ford with a naked white brilliance, and I saw Darl’s head on his father’s shoulder, his eyes still closed. Then Jack brushed something away from his boy’s eye, a food crumb, perhaps, and kissed him on the forehead, his face filled with an undisguised grief.

  IT WAS STILL raining and dark at sunrise the next morning. I read from Great-grandpa Sam’s journal at the breakfast table.

  AUGUST 30, 1891

  The preacher who ordained me had been branded in the face with burning horse shoes. He said all good things come to the righteous and the just. His words rose like snow flakes from the heat that had been seared into his skin. But today those words ring hollow on my ears. I have proved unworthy of my ordination. It is a folly for me to pretend otherwise.

  Them in the mud caves are drunk tonight. They brought in two white prostitutes and killed a wild pig and cooked it in a brush fire on the river bank and danced around the flames to fiddle music. I have thought of heading south for the Red River and Texas, but federal marshals have been stationed along the tick-fever line to keep sick herds from trailing up to the railheads in Kansas and I will be served with a federal warrant and locked in manacles for sure.

  My oil lamp has burned low and our little house is filled with shadows as I write these lines. The dirt in our garden is dry and cracked and swarming with insects, and Jennie is trying to swat the deer mice out of the melons and pumpkins with a burlap bag. It won’t do no good, but I will not try to tell her that.

  It is hard for me to think of myself as a fugitive from the law. The idea of it makes the insides of my hands sting as though bitten by sweatbees. Them from the mud caves are dipping whiskey out of the busted head of a barrel now, framed in the firelight like painted Indians. At Little Round Top I watched soldiers, boys, really, die in the V of my musket sight. Those memories cause me grave regret, even though it was war. But now I see rocks high on the hill above the Cimarron, a sharp-shooter’s den made for a Henry repeater or Winchester rifle. Down below, the Doolins and Daltons tip their cups in the firelight. I have to wipe the sweat off my palms onto my britches and not think the thoughts I am thinking.

  I tell myself, Better to slake thirst with whiskey than blood. But if I have come to this, I know my life as a drunkard is about to begin again. Tomorrow I’m going to ride north to the court in Wichita and leave the Rose of Cimarron behind. I have great trepidation about my treatment in a Yankee court and do not know if I will ever see her or Texas again. I hear tell a Scottish slaver wrote the beautiful hymn “Amazing Grace.” I never thought much on the words “a wretch like me” until this moment.

  I’ll ride through the camp below the mud caves in the morning, just so the Daltons and Doolins can never say they didn’t have a chance at my back. Emmett can usually control the others, but if he ain’t around, maybe my stay on the Cimarron won’t end so bad after all.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE NEXT DAY Marvin Pomroy recalled Virgil Morales to the stand and tore him up. After Marvin sat back down, I looked over at his table. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and his white shirt looked as bright as new snow against his fire-engine-red suspenders. He saw me looking at him and raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Marvin didn’t take prisoners.

  During a midmorning recess Emma Vanzandt rose from a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom and stopped me and Temple Carrol. Darl remained seated behind her, dressed like a fraternity boy, in gray slacks and a blue sports coat, a gold chain and tiny gold football strung outside the collar of his shirt.

  “Got a minute?” she said. Her face was heavily made up, and threadlike lines spread from her eyes and the sides of her mouth when she feigned a smile for passersby.

  “Sorry,” I said. Down the corridor I saw Jack Vanzandt buying a cigar at the concession counter.

  Emma’s thumb and index finger circled my wrist.

  “Don’t do this,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Blame the girl’s death on Darl.”

  “He’s not a defendant.”

  “Don’t insult me, Billy Bob.”

  “Your boy’s never been
made accountable. Why don’t y’all let him stand on his own for once?”

  “Jack’s made arrangements to send him to a treatment center in California. It’s a one-year in-patient program. For God’s sakes, give us a chance to correct our problem.”

  “Darl came out to my house. He offered to give up his father,” I said.

  “He offered to—” Her face had the startled, still quality of someone caught in a photographer’s strobe.

  “You’ve got a monster in your house, Emma. Whatever happens in this courthouse won’t change that,” I said.

  Temple and I left her standing in the middle of the corridor, her mouth moving soundlessly while her stepson snipped his fingernails on the bench behind her.

  TEMPLE AND I went up to the second floor of the courthouse and bought cold drinks from the machine and drank them by a tall, arched window at the end of the hall. It had stopped raining temporarily, but the streets were flooded and the wake from passing automobiles slid up onto the courthouse lawn.

  “You bothered about what you said to Emma?” Temple asked.

  “Not really.”

  “If you’re worried about hanging it on Darl Vanzandt—”

  “The jury won’t see motive in Darl. We can make him an adverb but not a noun.”

  She was silent. I heard her set her aluminum soda can on top of the radiator.

  “You want to spell it out?” she asked.

  “Bunny Vogel’s going to have a bad day,” I said.

  “Wrong kid for it.”

  “Damn, I wish I could adjust like that. ‘Wrong kid for it.’ That’s great.”

  I walked back down the hall to the stairs, my boots echoing off the wood floor.

  She caught me halfway down, stepped in front of me on the landing, her arms pumped. A strand of her chestnut hair was curved on her chin. “There’s one person only, one, who has always been on your side. Sorry I never let you fuck me a few times so I could leave town without even a phone call. You only get that kind of loyalty with federal grade,” she said.